In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl," Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through the creation of this course,Ginsberg saw an opportunity to present the history of Beat Literature in his own inimitable way.

Out Now: Marking the 60th anniversary of City Lights Publishers, we present the intimate correspondence of Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti, documenting one of the longest relationships between a publisher and a writer.

Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish," a long poem written about the madness and death of his mother, Naomi, is widely considered to be one his major works. This special fiftieth­-anniversary edition of Kaddish & Other Poems features an illuminating afterword by...

First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a prophetic masterpiece--an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. Now a major...

One of the central relationships in the Beat scene was the long-lasting friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Ginsberg introduced Snyder to the East Coast Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, while Snyder himself became the model for the...

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) kept a journal his entire life, beginning at the age of eleven. In these first journals the most important and formative years of the poet’s storied life are captured, his inner thoughts detailed in what the San Francisco...

Here, for the first time, is a volume that gathers the published verse of Allen Ginsberg in its entirety, a half century of brilliant work from one of America's great poets. As the chief figure among the Beats, Ginsberg changed the course of...

Howl
Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript, and Variant Versions, Fully Annotated by Author, with Contemporaneous Correspondence, Account of First Public Reading, Legal Skirmishes, Pres

Allen Ginsberg

First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a prophetic masterpiece—an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. This...

In January 1953, William Burroughs began a seven-month expedition into the jungles of South America, ostensibly to find yage, the fabled hallucinogen of the Amazon. But Burroughs also cast his anthropological-satiric eye over the local regimes...

Whether criticizing the American government, protesting the war in Vietnam, or denouncing capitalism, Ginsberg gave voice to the moral conscience of the nation. His personal essays on Jean Genet, Andy Warhol, Philip Glass, and others, give us...

The leading poet of the Beat generation and late-twentieth-century American letters, a spokesman for the antiwar generation, an icon of the counterculture, Allen Ginsberg led a movement that profoundly altered the American literary and cultural...

Plutonian Ode: Title poem combines scientific info on 24,000-year cycle of the Great Year compared with equal half-life of Plutonium waste, accounting Homeric formula for appeasing underground millionaire Pluto Lord of Death, jack in the gnostic box...

"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy." Many of Ginsberg's most famous poems. Wake-up nightmares in Lower East Side, musings in public library, across the U.S. in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan...

The epigraph for Howl is from Walt Whitman: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Announcing his intentions with this ringing motto, Allen Ginsberg published a volume of poetry which broke so many social...

The original manuscript of this book, written between 1954 and 1965, has been in the safekeeping of City Lights all the years since Kerouac's death in 1969. Reaching beyond the scope of his Mexico City Blues, here are pomes about Mexico and Tangier...

Transcript, in English, of Genet's May Day Speech, delivered at Yale on the occasion of the 1970 May Day Rally in support of Bobby Seale (recently imprisoned) and the Black Panthers. A 25-page stapled booklet. Introduction by Allen Ginsberg. In very good condition.

The Beat movement exploded into American culture in the early 1950s with the force of prophecy. Not just another literary school, it was an artistic and social revolution. William S. Burroughs proclaimed that the Beat writers were “real...

A blow-by-blow unearthing of the places where the Beat writers first came to full bloom: the flat where Ginsberg wrote "Howl;" Gary Snyder's zen cottage in Berkeley; the ghostly railroad yards where Kerouac and -Cassady toiled; the pads where Jack &...

Allen Ginsberg was a serious shutterbug who delighted in taking candid snapshots of friends and fellow writers, but up until now readers have had little chance to consider the "poetic" world of his photographs. Here in the form of twenty detachable...